A lot of crime dramas portray a character that keeps hopping cars to avoid detection.
Hopping cars is actually an effective method if someone is to track your location. They need to follow you throughout your journey and can’t achieve their objective by tracking the license plates through cameras.
Proxies for marketing, surprisingly, work similarly. The cars are replaced by servers and physical devices, and you are the one who hops. Technically your requests do, but you get the idea. The license plates, however, are the IP addresses.
From a technical standpoint, proxies are services that forward your requests to the intended servers through other physical or virtual devices. The intermediary devices may or may not originate from different locations, but they must have different IP addresses.
How Proxies Help in Marketing
Marketing requires you to leverage the power of proxies to mostly scrape the publicly available data for either analysis or lead generating. However, the utilities go above and beyond to develop marketing strategies like content and keyword strategy.
Social media marketing and search engine scraping are two aspects of marketing that proxies help a lot with. As both of them require anonymity and agility to succeed, using a proxy to hide is the better choice.
If you have a substantial social media presence, you might require to create multiple social media accounts on the same platforms for interaction and engagement. The social media platforms don’t take this kindly.
They try to minimize the number of accounts a business has. For that, they track your IP address to determine if the requests on different accounts are coming from the same source. Proxies hide your IP address to deceive the algorithms from tracking and blocking you.
Search engine scraping is required when you need to harvest data of your competitors and yourself for SEO audit or keyword research. As the search engines already have APIs for the same, they’re unlikely to encourage you to do the scraping. They often employ search pattern recognition in addition to IP detection. Using a proxy with human behavior simulation may help you stay out of trouble.
Tips to Leverage the Power of Proxy
When trying to make use of proxies for marketing, you need to keep a checklist for choosing the most effective proxies.
1. Use a Proxy With Geo-Unblocking Features
Geo-blocking is a concept employed by websites that prevent you from accessing content that’s exclusive to other regions. Netflix is a prime example of geo-blocking. You can’t access content available only for Australia if you are from the USA without using an Australia proxy. The residential and dedicated proxies help you access local businesses and the geo-blocked content of your competitors.
Organizations may have different reasons to geo-block their content, but as a marketer, not being able to access your competitors’ content can be frustrating. Your competitor analysis is doomed to fail if you can’t even access their websites or social media pages.
Ensure that your proxy has a geo-unblocking feature that lets you harvest competitor data through a location where it’s available. However, accessing their content is often not enough. Since you need to scrape their websites and apps to harvest the data, falling back on a proxy that’s reliable and fast is the wise alternative.
2. Make Sure to Use a Proxy with Maximum Uptime
Your worst nightmare comes true with a sub-par proxy that crashes down frequently without notifying you. Imagine operating 8 social media accounts from the same network while your proxy is down. As a result, all of your accounts with thousands of followers get blocked.
The uptime of proxies depends on several factors. It may depend on the physical devices that are being used, it may depend on the quality of connections, and it also may depend on the traffic on the proxy networks. Whatever the case, all these issues are directly correlated to the quality of the service the proxy provider is offering and can be mitigated by installing better hardware and software on their part.
3. Choose a Proxy With a Smaller Rotation Time
Rotating the IP address is as necessary as masking it. If your proxy assigns you an IP address and forces you to stick with the same throughout the session, it may not contribute to anonymity as much as you think. Your scraping patterns can be detected by the platforms and the particular IP can get blocked.
This is an issue with cheap proxies. They don’t have a substantial IP pool to offer enough IP addresses to the users to rotate them after a set period. The smaller the rotation time, the better the security. A previously assigned IP address may get back into the rotation, but that shouldn’t harm you in any way.
4. Ensure That Your Proxy has Dedicated Servers
Proxy providers often use the devices of personal users who use their service to forward your connections and vice versa. This may be an effective arrangement but lacks security and stability. If a personal device is used, the connections may be lost due to various reasons like power cuts and bandwidth issues.
Using proxies for marketing with dedicated servers ensures that your connection isn’t handled through personal devices that are vulnerable to attacks and can be turned off at any time. The proxy providers employ personal devices to minimize their operational costs and to keep the rates down.
Dedicated proxies may be a bit expensive, but are more stable and secure for marketing purposes.
5. Ensure That Your Proxy is Fast
As proxies forward the requests through different devices, the connection can effectively be slow. Especially the proxies that employ personal devices are prone to face this issue. If any of the devices used for the connections has a bandwidth limitation, creating a bottleneck, that can slow down the whole operation.
Before buying proxies for marketing, ensure that you are getting what you pay for. Consider asking for trial periods if it’s the speed you are looking for. Since a slower connection is detrimental to web scraping, your marketing interests aren’t satisfied without a faster connection. https://propernewstime.com/
The Bottom Line
Proxies can be effective for developing marketing strategies. To leverage the power of proxies for marketing, ensure that your provider supports accessing geo-blocked content. Maximum uptime and faster rotation of IPs are also critical for a proxy to be effective. Consider dedicated server proxies for a secured and faster operation.
